The JACK folks and I have agreed on a little specification for device
reservation that allows clean hand-over of audio device access from
PulseAudio to JACK and back. The specification is generic enough to allow
locking/hand-over of other device types as well, not just audio cards. So, in
case someone needs to implement a similar kind of locking/handover for any kind of resource here's some
prior art you can base your work on. Given that HAL is supposed to go away
pretty soon this might be an option for a replacement for HAL's current device
locking. The logic is as simple as it can get. Whoever owns a certain service name on
the D-Bus session bus owns the device access. For further details, read the spec.